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Envirotech book wins ASEH Marsh Prize

Finn Arne Jørgensen — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 06:16:23 +0000

Timothy J. LeCain’s Mass Destruction: The Men and Giant Mines That Wired America and Scarred the Planet won the George Perkins Marsh Prize from the ASEH because it is gutsy, eloquently written and narrated, and carefully argued. It is a fine example of “envirotech” scholarship, a sub-field within environmental history concerned with the intersection of technological systems and their inventors, the science that underscores those systems, the environments that comprise or fuel those systems and, more often than not, the landscapes that are utterly destroyed by them.

LeCain takes the reader on a marvelous journey, which starts with cosmic super-giant stars and their role in the creation of copper and ends with the engineers that built the technologies of “mass destruction” to access the king metal. As LeCain tours ranchlands strewn with dying livestock with faces devoured by industrial poisons, the reader learns in no uncertain terms the connections between technologies, economies, engineered environments, and the bodies that live on and near them.

LeCain proposes that historians often talk of mass production and mass consumption, but rarely of the mass destruction that underlay the mining that produced the copper that connects virtually every element of modern life, from refrigerator coils to battleships. The writing is eloquent and it effectively leads the reader through the story at a brisk pace. For LeCain, technological systems, ranch lands and the livestock that dwell there, engineered subterranean environments, riparian ecosystem, Rocky Mountain cities, and the porous human bodies that call these places home all seamlessly connect, both in his narrative and his analysis. It is a great read.

George Perkins Marsh Prize Committee:

Brett L. Walker, Chair

Thomas Andrews

Thomas Zeller

http://www.aseh.net/awards/comments-on-award-recipients

Envirotech Prize 2010 Call for Submittals

Dolly Jørgensen — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 09:08:16 +0000

Envirotech invites submissions for the Envirotech Prize for Best Article on the Inter play between Technology and the Environment. The Envirotech Prize recognizes the best article published in either a journal or article collection on the relationship between technology and the environment in history. The prize committee is particularly seeking innovative publications that explore new ways of thinking about the interplay between technological systems and the natural environment. Articles originally published in any language are welcome, but applicants must provide a translation of non-English articles. More junior scholars are especially encouraged to submit their publications. To be eligible for the 2010 prize, the article must be published between January 1, 2008, and October 30, 2009.

The Envirotech Prize carries a cash award of $250 and will be conferred at the American Society for Environmental History conference in Portland, Oregon, March 10-14, 2010.

Send one electronic copy of your article and a brief curriculum vitae to prize@envirotechweb.org to be considered. The deadline for submissions is November 15, 2009.

The Sustainable Development Paradox

Finn Arne Jørgensen — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 09:25:42 +0000

The January 2009 issue of the E-Journal of Solidarity, Sustainability, and Nonviolence has been posted. As always, it is open access. Simply click the following link:

The Sustainable Development Paradox
http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv05n01.html

A series of articles on “dimensions of sustainable development” is being published. The January 2009 issue shows the impossibility of integrating the social, economic, and political dimensions of sustainable development unless homo economicus becomes homo solidarius.

Please post and/or forward this notice to friends and colleagues who might be interested in the complex issues of human development,
international solidarity, and environmental sustainability. See the archive for links to previously posted issues (annotated with
content outlines):

May 2005 to December 2008

http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisust.html

The current economic and environmental crises confirm the importance of the issues we are researching. Any feedback is deeply appreciated.

Sincerely,
Luis
_____________
Luis T. Gutierrez, Ph.D.
The Pelican Web
Editor, Solidarity, Sustainability, and Nonviolence

http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisust.html

CFP: Visual Languages (and Representations) of the Sky: Frameworks and Focal Points in Social Context

Finn Arne Jørgensen — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 07:38:54 +0000

International Congress of History of Science and Technology
Budapest, Hungary, July 28-August 2, 2009.

Conveners:
Cornelia Luedecke: C.Luedecke@lrz.uni-muenchen.de
James R. Fleming: jfleming@colby.edu

The sky too belongs to the Landscape: —the ocean of air in which we live and move, with its continents and islands of cloud, its tides and currents of constant and variable winds… in which the bolt of heaven is forged, and the fructifying rain condensed… can never be to the zealous Naturalist a subject of tame and unfeeling contemplation — Luke Howard

Looking up, whether casually or with instruments, involves both frameworks and focal points. To observe the sky, whether clouds, sunsets, portents, or myriad other phenomena, is to visualize it, combining impressions, information, assumptions, and apprehensions. To represent the observations, whether with the naked eye or mediated, on rock, stained glass, paper, canvas, photographic film, or digitally, involves theory, language, technique, and cultural assumptions. It involves looking at it in a social and historical context.

The scientific gaze has trended toward full automation and abstraction, with data being acquired, analyzed and interpreted often without any direct visual inspection or representation. This has certainly not been the case historically in religious or aesthetic traditions. In landscape painting, for example, at least half of the scene is from the horizon up.

The International Commission on History of Meteorology invites historians of science and technology, art historians, artists, filmmakers, meteorologists, and other interested scholars to examine and explore the visual languages, cultural meanings, and representations of the sky—especially its weather and climate-related phenomena—in all its transient and transcendent glory.

Registration deadlines are announced on the Congress website: http://www.conferences.hu/ichs09/

Please email proposed paper title, 250 word abstract, and short bio to either of the symposium conveners before Dec. 15th.

Call for participation: History of Climate Change Conference at Colby College, 1-4 April 2009

Finn Arne Jørgensen — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 17:37:59 +0000

A conference on the history of climate change is being held at Colby College, Waterville, Maine, 1-4 April 2009. This conference, titled “Climate and Cultural Anxiety: Historical Perspectives,” will be international in scope, interdisciplinary in nature, and intergenerational in its inclusion of both graduate and undergraduate students. The meeting will be focused on a discussion of pre-circulated papers being prepared for volume 26 of Osiris to be edited by James Fleming and Vladimir Jankovic. Graduate students will be encouraged to present their climate-related work in a special session aimed at dissertation improvement. The meeting is open to all. Colby College is committed to excellence through diversity and strongly encourages the participation of members of under-represented groups. Some funding may be available for invited participants. Portland, Maine is served by several major airlines, Amtrak, and direct bus service from Boston. To keep costs manageable, the College is offering its preferred local hotel rate of $81 per night, single or double, with breakfast included, subsidized meals on campus, and local transportation support. Potential participants, including graduate students, should submit an abstract and short biographical sketch as soon as possible, but no later than 15 Dec. 2008; the deadline for submitting pre-circulated conference papers is 15 Feb. 2009; and the final deadline for all attendees to register is 1 March 2009. Please direct all correspondence via e-mail with the subject header “Colby Climate Conference” to James Fleming, jfleming@colby.edu.

2008 Envirotech Article Prize Winner Announced

Finn Arne Jørgensen — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 18:51:05 +0000

The winner of the 2008 Envirotech Prize for the best article examining the relationships between technology and the environment is Paul S. Sutter’s “Nature’s Agents or Agents of Empire? Entomological Workers and Environmental Change during the Construction of the Panama Canal.” (Isis, 2007, 98: 724-754.) Sutter offers a path breaking analysis of the interplay between the physical environment, technological manipulation of nature, and scientific understandings of both natural and human-induced change. The Americans’ conceptualization of the tropical Panama environment and its inhabitants, Sutter argues, interacted with and at times conflicted with their practical experience of how mosquito vectors worked. Through their research on mosquitoes, scientists and sanitary engineers gradually came to realize that human-induced changes from the construction of the canal—like spoils piles and drainage ditches—were a key cause of malarial outbreaks. However, such complex environmental insights and the corresponding attempts to implement technological solutions often contradicted conventional imperial ideologies that emphasized the supposed racial and cultural superiority of the American people. Noting that, “material environmental influence can be seen quite clearly at the points of tension between ideological predisposition and empirical observation,” Sutter’s approach also offers a compelling means for analyzing the material functions of historical environments without unduly privileging contemporary scientific beliefs. Drawing on abundant new primary research and demonstrating great theoretical and historiographical sophistication, “Nature’s Agents or Agents of Empire?” powerfully suggests the importance of technological and environmental factors in understanding the role of race and imperialism in twentieth century American history.

The breadth and depth of the submissions for the 2008 Envirotech Article Prize competition was incredibly impressive. The committee read twenty-five articles published between January 2006 and June 2008 for the prize. The shear number of recent publications in the emerging field of envirotech shows just how far the field has come in the past few years.

The breadth of the articles was most impressive. Articles were published not only in the journals specializing in environmental and technological history such as Environmental History, Environment and History, and Technology and Culture, but also in journals specializing in other fields, including the history of science, environmental policy, economic history, and American studies, and as chapters in edited book collections. Considering the broad range of submission, we cannot discuss each article, but the committee wanted to mention some of the broader themes and trends apparent in recent work in the field.

The submissions revealed how the theoretical frameworks of envirotech inquiries have continued to grow. William Rollins’ piece, “Reflections on a Spare Tire: SUVs and Postmodern Environmental Consciousness,” Environmental History, 2006, 11: 684-723, employs a cultural analysis to explore the relationship between the rise of the SUV and environmental thought. Besides being occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, Rollins’ article offers some very interesting theoretical musings about modernist and post-modernist transportation systems. Several articles, including Sutter’s prize winner and Tsegaye Habte Nega, “Saving Wild Rice: The Rise and Fall of the Nett Lake Dam,” Environment and History 14 (2008): 5-39, explicitly employed Science, Technology & Society (STS) methodologies such as Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to understand how actors and their positions influenced environmental and technological outcomes. Marionne Cronin, “Northern Visions: Aerial Surveying and the Canadian Mining Industry, 1919-1928” (Technology and Culture 2007, 48: 303-330) shows how a well-known history of technology framework – technological styles – can be reanalyzed and assessed by including geography and geology as forces. These articles show an increasing incorporation of frameworks from various historical disciplines into envirotech, strengthening the methodological toolkit considerably.

Subject matter was extremely wide-ranging from medieval water control to nineteenth-century scientific surveys to modern sustainable development, but environmental justice emerged as a key area of inquiry for the envirotech junction. In Nancy Langston’s article, “The Retreat from Precaution: Regulating Diethylstilbestrol (DES), Endocrine Disruptors, and Environmental Health” (Environmental History 2008, 13: 41-65), we see how a conjuncture of political, scientific, and conceptual factors allowed the introduction of DES as a medical treatment and the deplorable environmental consequences. Likewise, Julie Sze framed her contribution on DES, “Boundaries and Border Wars: DES, Technology, and Environmental Justice” (American Quarterly 2006, 58: 791-814) as a study of “technologically polluted bodies,” building on Donna Haraway’s cyborg concept. Other environmental justice pieces included David Torres-Rouff, “Water Use, Ethnic Conflict and Infrastructure in Nineteenth-Century Los Angeles” (Pacific Historical Review 2006, 75: 119-140), Andrew Jenks, “Model City USA: The Environmental Cost of Victory in World War II and the Cold War” (Environmental History 2007, 12: 552-77), and Matthew Gandy, “Landscapes of Disaster: Water, Modernity, and Urban Fragmentation in Mumbai” (Environment and Planning A 2008, 40: 108 – 130).

The 2008 Envirotech Prize submissions show how illuminating including both technology and the environment in our historical stories can be. We hope scholars will continue to explore this fruitful area and make our award-winner in 2010 even more difficult to select.

ICOHTEC Prize for Young Scholars announcement

Finn Arne Jørgensen — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 12:58:31 +0000

The ICOHTEC Prize is sponsored by the Juanelo Turriano Foundation and consists of 3,000 Euros. ICOHTEC, the International Committee for the History of Technology, is interested in the history of technology studies focusing on the technological development as well as its relationship to science, society, economy, culture and the environment. The history of technology covers all periods of human history and all populated areas. In addition, there is no limitation as to theoretical or methodological approaches. Eligible are original works in any of the official ICOHTEC languages (English, French, German, Russian or Spanish) in the history of technology (published or unpublished Ph. D. theses, monographs — no articles) written by scholars who, when applying for the prize, are not older than 37 years. For the ICOHTEC Prize 2009, please, send three copies of the work you want to submit and a summary of 4500 words in English to the ICOHTEC Secretary General, Professor Timo Myllyntaus, School of History, Kaivokatu 12, 20 014 University of Turku, Finland, by 31 December 2008.

If the work is a PhD thesis, it should have been accepted by your university in 2007 or 2008; if it is a published work, the year of publication should be 2007 or 2008. The submission should be accompanied by a CV and, if applicable, a list of publications. Applicants are free to add references or reviews on the work submitted.

ICOHTEC, founded in Paris in 1968, is a Scientific Section within the Division of the History of Science and Technology of the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IUHPST/DHST). It is a leading international organisation in the history of technology and has its membership base mainly in Europe, but also in the Americas, East Asia, India and Australia. Research activities, in which ICOHTEC members co-operate, are on a comparative national basis, stressing aspects of co-operation between various nations, regions or institutions.

ICOHTEC holds annual symposia and venues are spread round the world. Next year’s meeting “Ideas and Instruments in Social Context” will take place in Budapest, Hungary, as part of the 23rd International Congress of History of Science and Technology, 26-31 July 2009. ICON is the organisation’s journal containing scholarly articles. Current issues are reported in the Newsletter, which also contains country reports on the history of technology and bibliographical surveys. Further information is available at the homepage: http://www.icohtec.org/

For more information, please, contact Timo Myllyntaus, ICOHTEC Secretary General, timmyl@utu.fi.

Newsletter Call for Items

Finn Arne Jørgensen — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 11:21:48 +0000

We have had very few submissions of news and other items lately. Please send me an email (or even better, register on the web site and post it yourself!) if you have anything relevant you want to share. This can be member updates, conference news and notes, new books, etc.

Call for Envirotech Syllabi

Finn Arne Jørgensen — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 11:21:00 +0000

The Envirotech web site contains a section called “Envirotech Resources”, which is mostly based on old discussions from the mailing list. We plan to collaboratively overhaul this section (with envirotech-relevant essays, links, multimedia, publications, syllabi, excursions, novels, archives, etc.) over the next few years. We plan to have one of these topics as the theme for each of the two annual newsletters,. I, as the editor, will also solicit submissions from envirotechies.

For the Fall 2008 newsletter, I want to focus on Envirotech Syllabi. I know many of you have taught (or followed) courses on environment and technology. Please send me syllabi or share your experiences with teaching envirotech courses as comments below.

Currently, we only have 3 syllabi on the web page – you can see them here: http://envirotechweb.org/envirotech-resources/syllabi/

Hal Rothman Research Fellowship from ASEH

Dolly Jørgensen — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 08:37:45 +0000

The Hal Rothman Research Fellowship was created to recognize graduate student achievements in environmental history research in honor of Hal Rothman, recipient of ASEH’s Distinguished Service award in 2006 and editor of Environmental History for many years. The fellowship provides a single payment of $1,000 for PhD graduate student research and travel in the field of environmental history, without geographical restriction. The funds must be used to support archival or other relevant project research and travel during 2009.

Students enrolled in any PhD program worldwide are eligible to apply. Applications will be accepted June 1 – September 30, 2008, and the recipient will be selected and notified in December 2008, for funding in January 2009. To apply, please submit the following three items:

1. A two-page statement (500 words) explaining your project and how you intend to use the research funds.
2. A c.v.
3. A letter of recommendation from your graduate advisor.

All items must be submitted electronically to Dolly Jorgensen, chair of the committee, by September 30, 2008 at dolly@jorgensenweb.net